Gastiór, Laoc, Caomhnór
“It’s beautiful.”
What was beautiful, in Lucien’s opinion, was the light in his Fae husband’s eyes as he studied the huge tank built into one wall of what was going to be the new Purgatory dance floor. Other clubs had cages for dancers; one the three of them had found in New York had glass-walled shower stalls. Purgatory was going to have the biggest maudite fish tank anyone had ever seen.
Complete with naked mermen. One of whom—because le bon Dieu apparently had a perverse sense of humor—was going to be Lucien de Winter.
Arms went around Lucien from behind, and a chin rested on his shoulder; Lucien didn’t need to turn, or even to look down and see the “Semper Fi” tattooed on one forearm to recognize Mac. “Ready to take the plunge, Fuzzball?”
Lucien grunted. “I hope the filters in this thing are up to spec. You know how I shed.”
A flash of white reflected in the glass of the tank was Rhoann’s grin. “Perhaps we should put a tail on you.”
“If the tail didn’t have hair, no one would believe it was mine.” Lucien couldn’t stay grumpy, though, not when Rhoann teased him. “But I think the two of you, not to mention our boss, are out of your minds, if you think our guests are going to be turned on watching me doing underwater barrel rolls.”
Rhoann left off studying the tank fittings and took Lucien’s hands, running his thumbs lightly over knuckles dusted with short dark curly hair; his slight worried frown was one of the sweetest things Lucien had ever seen. “How could they not be, laród-ar-Fuzz?”
Lucien found himself having to swallow an unexpected lump in his throat before he could answer. “I love you, too.”
Mac leaned around and kissed the side of Lucien’s neck. “He beat me to it. And I’m not even going to tell you how many guys used to come up to the bar and ask me why the bouncer wasn’t part of the floor show.”
Lucien craned his neck, partly to plant a kiss of his own on Mac and partly to glance at the new bar, the one the workmen had just finished installing last week, to replace the one Mac had presided over ever since Tiernan bought the place. The curved expanse, now taking up the whole back wall of one level of the club instead of being shoehorned into a corner, looked pretty much the same as it always had, from where Lucien stood. But no one had been able to figure out how to replicate the show-stopping feature of the original, the hellish flames dancing under the glass bar top, that seemed to go down and down into an infinite depth. Conall thought he might be able to do it with magick, or maybe Rian could, but nobody wanted to fuck around with magick of any kind near the great nexus, not with the way it and its companion wellspring were acting right now. Good thing he and his husbands had decided to try out the famed nexus chamber when they had—a half-Royal Fae in the throes of erotic overload was the kind of thing guaranteed to short out the entire wellspring network right now.
The fact that their new-found underground garden of delights was now off limits seriously pissed Lucien off. It wasn’t forever, though. The three of them could get back to happy business just as soon as they figured out how to kill the monster who had left him for dead behind the bar back in August.
Can’t happen soon enough for me. Lucien was a peaceable sort—as peaceable as a nightclub bouncer built like a hairy fire hydrant and married to an only-sort-of-ex-Marine could be, anyway—but he was looking forward to getting his hands around whatever was left of Janek O’Halloran’s throat and getting creative.
“I recognize that look.” Mac nipped at the top of Lucien’s ear.
“What look?” Lucien blinked. “And I could have sworn you’re standing behind me.”
“You reflect in the tank.” Mac’s chuckle rumbled against Lucien’s back. “At least for now—once you’ve been for a swim after we open, the glass is going to have... uh, palm-prints... all over it.”
Lucien couldn’t help snorting. “I repeat, what look?”
Rhoann wrapped his arms around both humans. He could do that—Mac was a good head taller than Lucien, but their Fae had Mac beat by a good four or five inches, and he had arms to match his height. “The look you wore through most of the bás i’gcuine last night.”
The Faen words Rhoann had originally translated for them as “war council” turned out to have meant something closer to “fore-memory of death.” The intent of the Demesne of Purgatory had been, more or less, to create the memory of the Marfach’s death before it happened. And, like pretty much everything asking Fae to behave in an organized manner, it had gone south from the moment Rian tried calling the group to order. It hadn’t helped that Fae who learned English magickally thought the word “brainstorming” was almost as funny as horseradish. Which was actually pretty damn funny, once Maelduin had explained it to him.
There had been some great opportunities for glowering, though. Lucien supposed that was the “look” his husbands were on about. “I didn’t notice either one of you looking disappointed at the thought of killing the d’épais de marde,” he grumbled.
“Hell, no.” Lucien thought he could feel Mac’s jaw clench, where his husband’s chin rested on top of his head. “But I’d feel a lot better right now if anyone had had any useful ideas.”
“It helps to know that it fears water.” There was a smile in Rhoann’s voice, one very different from his usual sexy innocence. “I should be able to do something with that.”
It hadn’t been all that long ago that Lucien had been terrified of water. And trapped in a fuck-ton of it, reliving not-quite-random memories with the Marfach on his ass. It was bizarre beyond belief that he was now sharing a soul with a part-time merman, and getting ready to perform as one himself.
And that wasn’t even close to being the strangest thing that had happened to him since August.
“Just between you, me, Fuzzball, and the four walls, I think water may be the best chance we have.”
Rhoann tilted his head, thinking; when he did that, his crest of blond hair always made Lucien think of a cockatoo. “How does having water between us and the walls help?”
Mac groaned good-naturedly and smacked Rhoann’s ass.
“Oh. I am being too literal-minded again.” Rhoann rested his chin on the side of Lucien’s head Mac wasn’t occupying. Lucien was beginning to feel squashed. Squashed between his husbands was one of his favorite feelings, though.
“Don’t ever change.” A kiss happened somewhere where Lucien couldn’t see it. “Seriously, though, I don’t think our mages and our blade-dancers have thought this one through. They’re still thinking in terms of taking on the Marfach here, on this side of the Pattern.”
Lucien held back a groan of his own. That particular argument had gone on nearly till sunrise, and parts of it had probably continued past then—neither Kevin nor Terry had been happy with their respective partners’ bloody-minded enthusiasm for the idea of taking turns vivisecting the monster, and while Josh had mostly looked resigned to what the royal mage and the Loremaster had concocted, their Prince had obviously been saving a few choice words for Cuinn.
Still... “It’s not like we have much a of a choice. We can’t even get a skinny whisper through the nexus, we sure as hell aren’t going to be able to fit a 6’6” zombie through it.”
He could feel Mac shaking his head. “Sometimes the ground dictates your tactics. But sometimes you can’t afford to let it.”
Lucien shrugged, mostly because he liked the way it felt. “You’re the soldier. But I don’t think you’re going to get Tiernan and Maelduin to listen to you.” Or me, he nearly added. But that wouldn’t help anything. And even Lucien knew it was ridiculous for him to think he had a chance, one on one against the Marfach. His protective instincts—the gift of his Fae soul, he’d been told—didn’t give a shit about his chances, though. He just wanted to take the tabarnak de câlisse down.
“I know.” Mac’s sigh stirred the curly hairs on the side of Lucien’s neck. “But if we can herd the Marfach through the nexus without having to get close enough for it to get at any of us, nobody has to risk getting killed, or worse.”
Or worse being one of those ideas it would have been impossible for Lucien to get his head around before August. Not anymore, though. And he would be fucked with a chainsaw before he let or worse happen to either of his husbands. The monster had caught him flat-footed once before. It wasn’t going to do it again.
A kiss on the top of his head startled Lucien; he looked up into cut-topaz eyes and a gentle smile. “My laród-ar-Fuzz is troubled.”
Lucien rested his head against Rhoann’s chest. He was still getting used to the idea of letting somebody else be the strong one—he’d been tight with a Marine since the mid-’70s, but he’d had to hold that Marine up through some incredibly shitty times, and having someone else doing the same thing for him was still new. “Your Fuzzball just wants to put an end to that shitbag. And probably can’t.”
It didn’t surprise him that Rhoann had known where his head was at. He and Mac had always seemed to have that knack with each other, and when the third part of their shared soul had arrived from the Realm, he’d slipped right into that communion like he’d always been there.
And Rhoann wasn’t the only one who could head-hop. Clear as day, Lucien could sense the pull the huge water tank behind them had on his Fae husband. “How long has it been since you’ve been able to sleep in water?”
“Are we counting the time in the bathtub?”
Mac nearly choked, and Lucien only just managed to turn a guffaw into a cough. “That was just maybe the worst idea any of us ever had.” Watching Rhoann trying to curl up in the tub in their apartment had been like... well, watching John Cleese trying to get comfortable on top of a coffee table. “No, we’re not counting the time in the bathtub.”
“Nearly two weeks, then.” Rhoann grimaced. “Since the wellsprings became unstable, including the one under the Pool.”
Mac rested his hands on Rhoann’s shoulders. “That’s not good.”
Rhoann laughed softly. “Neither is what happens to our wellspring when the three of us are together there. And I have no wish to sleep alone.”
“You don’t have to.” Lucien twisted around to look down into the cock pit. The black leather playground famed in song and story was going to be reborn in the new Purgatory—only this time, its protection from D.C.’s finest was going to rely less on Lucien’s sixth sense and Fiachra’s truthsight, and more on a state-of-the-art lockdown system—and the furniture had just been delivered yesterday morning. “Mac, d’you think the two of us can fit on one of those sofas?”
“You, me, and half the cast of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert.”
It took the two of them—three, once Rhoann caught on to what they were doing—a few minutes, but eventually they hauled one of the sofas up the few steps separating the pit from the rest of the club and positioned it next to the tank. Of course, the only working light switch was all the way over on the other side of the maudite room; by the time Lucien found it and killed the lights, Mac had skinned out of his trousers and was mostly finished removing his leg, working by the light of his cell phone.
Rhoann was—of course—watching, fascinated, from inside the tank. Fae had never developed much in the way of technology—hadn’t needed to—and Rhoann had thought Mac’s C-leg was magickal at first.
But, then, the half-Royal Fae had thought Mac was magickal, too.
That makes two of us.
* * *
Cape Fear, North Carolina
The first thing the male noticed—well, the second, after the pale daggers of sunlight stabbing their way through his closed eyelids—was the uncomfortable way his naked body was sprawled out over jagged rocks.
He debated for a minute over whether to open his eyes first, inviting the light to ream out his eye sockets but giving him a better idea of where they’d all landed this time, or try to sit up, the better to see whatever corner of hell they occupied, and just maybe get an idea of which way food might be.
He wasn’t willing to waste more than a minute on that debate, though, because he was fucking starving. They all were. He managed to roll himself onto his side, scraping flesh from his ribs on a spine of rock but not giving a shit, and pushed himself up, bracing himself on one trembling arm.
His hand slipped on wet rock. He fell forward, his arm going into cold water up to the elbow.
The male jerked upright like a child’s toy on a string, his eyes wide and staring. His body didn’t give a fuck what his eyes were doing; it was preoccupied with scrambling to get as far away from the water surrounding him as possible.
They were all back in their ocean lair, south of the nexus. Not a meal in sight. And the tide was coming in.
What is it? Somehow, the female managed to sound dazed, panicked, and imperious, all at once.
“As Meat would have tried to say, Sheeshush Fuckig Chrish!” The male wasn’t sure why he was trying to make a joke of this clusterfuck, other than that it beat the shit out of lying down and dying.
You have done a splendid job for us, as you promised. Not only do we still have no food, but we are surrounded by water.
“I bow to your wisdom, Commander of the Completely Fucking Obvious.”
The male’s sarcasm was strangely lost on the female. If superstition had any hold on me, I would say something worked against us.
“And what might that something be?” Sparring with his other self kept the male from scanning the rising water, remembering the way the ancient Loremasters had almost managed to use their terror of drowning against them.
Nothing in which any of us might believe. The male thought he could hear the female’s teeth grinding together—though that was unlikely given her fangs. Even Meat, were he alive, would want Guaire’s head enough to take care for our life.
“No shit.” None of them had ever questioned their meat wagon’s obsession—it had been a useful carrot to dangle in front of the poor bastard.
He was used to being ignored by the female. Unless we move quickly, sheer coincidence is going to kill us.
“Then let’s move.” The male’s gut clenched, hard; he wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d just splashed something on the rocks. A little gift for the gulls. “Now.”